I found this one of the most interesting econtalk podcasts. Let me pick one nit. Trying to argue that nationalism is not inherently war-generating, Hazony says,
universal wars are devoted to some kind of an ideology of world domination. I the case of the 30-Years’ War, it was the theory of the universal Catholic order. In the case of the Nepolonic Wars, the theory of the new universal French liberalism. And, in the two World Wars, an attempt by two German emperors in effect to try to, uh, make Germany Lord of the Earth.
My nit is with taking the view that World War I was an attempt to create a world order. Let’s even stipulate that Germany was the most war-seeking nation in 1914. My reading of the history is that Germany did not have a goal of world domination. I buy the argument that Germany started the first World War out of fear that if it did not fight then, it would at some point have to fight on more adverse terms. It saw Russia getting stronger every decade. Its ally, Austria-Hungary, had obvious weaknesses.
After World War I, many people saw the war as a case of nationalism run amok. I still think that is an appropriate way to look at it.
Now that The Virtue of Nationalism is available, I expect I will be giving it more attention going forward.
It seems to me that both nationalism and imperialism played sigificant roles in how a dispute between two countries grew into an intercontinental conflagration.
Not sure whether the extensive web of mutual defense treaties in place long before 1914 were nationalist or imperialist, probably more the latter, but they obviously were what lined up the dominos for the fall.
A Serbian nationalist group the Black Hand had Archduke Ferdinand assassinated in Croatia which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Dual Monarchy in English-language sources, a constitutional union of the Austrian Empire (the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council, or Cisleithania) and the Kingdom of Hungary (Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen or Transleithania).
This assassination led to Austro-Hungarian Empire declaring war on the Kingdom of Serbia. The Russian Empire (yes, that is what it was known as at the time) joined the war because it had an alliance with Serbia. Because France was in the Franco-Russian Alliance it joined the war united with Russia. Remember France was in this alliance too promote its colonial ambitions.
The German Empire (yes that is what its name was at the time) was in the Dual Alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire so it declared war on Russia which opened the two fronts. The Dual-Alliance was part of a system of treaties negotiated earlier by Bismarck that was intended to prevent wars. Bismarck had rejected the movement towards a “greater Germany” that included Austria in favor of a “lesser Germany”that did not. And Germany’s colonial ambitions in Africa rivalled France’s.
So, Hazony would not appear to entirely bereft of evidence supporting his indictment of imperialism.
But one would think that his understanding of the methods of imperialism would at least informed his appreciation of John Locke.
Harzony goes off on tangents attacking John Locke at every turn because supposedly Locke’s rationalism does not encompass familial relations (utterly ignoring Locke’s book on fatherhood) and tribal loyalties. He might consider that one of the transformations that Locke triggered was the growth of articulated rights in constitutions and other documents that enabled unrelated tribes to make common alliances in the form of nations and ultimately fostered decolonization. Roberts didn’t seem willing to push back at all on Harzony’s characterization of Locke. Which was surprising given Roberts book on how Adam Smith can improve your life. Smith and Locke being the fathers of classical liberalism and all that. I anticipate that many book reviews will.
I don’t know that you can draw a clear, or even a grey, line between nationalism and ideology of world domination. The post WW2 US nationalism was used to justify aggressive interventions in Korea and Vietnam, as well as justifying large scale troop deployments in other areas. The “we have to fight them over there or over here” sort of ethos has switched from communists to drug cartels to radical Islamists, and almost anything can be justified in “the interests of national security”. I don’t think that there is an obvious line where on one side you are definitely a nationalist and on the other side pushing for world domination.
When it comes to global conflict, I lean toward the the macro level trends identified by long cycle theory
https://energeopolitics.wordpress.com/tag/long-cycle-theory/
I’m mystified by the notion that nationalism is a cause of war. It seems absurd to me to think it is. I consider myself a nationalist: I want the US government to place the interests of the US above the interests of other countries, and to place the interests of US citizens above the interests of the citizens of other countries. That fact does not mean I think going to war is necessarily in the best interests of the US and US citizens.
Most organized collective violence occurs at the level of nation versus nation in the modern era because the nation is the largest cohesive political unit in existence today. If that ceases to be the case, the unit will simply evolve or devolve in scale. But the conflict will not go away. In fact, if the unit gets smaller, violence may become more frequent.
Of course, if progressives have their way and manage to completely destroy the concept of nationalism and patriotism, then, yes, if one chooses dimi status over combat, as the left’s beta boys are wont to do in the face of a determined foe, yes, one can individually just choose to die or stick their bare a** up in the air for the barbarian as an alternative to war.
This is yet another one of those examples of a case in which the analysis of the narrow question on the merits becomes completely unreliable because of the implications of the answer to larger political agendas. Like “What caused the Depression.” – “It was whatever implies that next time we can defend doing nothing / deregulation / job guarantees / safety net / basic income / fiscal stimulus / monetary stimulus / narrow banking / etc., etc. !”
Those who want to argue for the existence of strongly sovereign and independent states, interacting with each other at arms length on the basis of treaty and classical international law, are going to say that there have always been all kinds of wars for all kinds of reasons, and that something like WWI could have (and did) happen for a variety of other causes, and that WWI in particular was mostly as bad as it was because strategies and logistics processes hadn’t caught up to that era’s rapid and radical disruption cause by novel tactics, mechanization, and other new military technologies.
Globalists who dream of the functional equivalent of one worldwide-state run by the same universal progressive ideology for the sake of all humanity (and with perhaps some local divisions and jurisdictions kept around for administrative efficiency or the same reasons behind the “community policing” theory – “multinational progressivism”) will say that nationalism of any kind is both (1) evil, tribal, and oppressive racism, and (2) inherently belligerent and inevitably violent against other nations, because it’s too easy to stir up animosity towards an outgroup, and local politicians looking to distract from domestic difficulties will exploit that fact to pin the blame for everything on dehumanized foreigners.
I bought Hazony’s book and plan on reviewing it, but given my current time constraints, I’d be lucky to finish before 2020.
What a pointless debate. We’re obviously not going to have world government; China, Russia, India, among others, are not interested. The notion that we can bring an end to war by abolishing the nation state is silly. And what kind of “world government” will it be? If it’s incompetent, incessantly virtue-signaling authoritarian technocracy, as we see in the EU, I’ll pass.
Since world government is not going to happen, it seems that the people who would like to do away with the nation state altogether are willing to accept, as a consolation prize, the abolition of nations (Western ones, at least) through massive immigration, while keeping the states. Once any sort of national identity has been obliterated, the transnational elites of the West will be able to govern their respective states in cooperation with each other with minimal interference from their respective “peoples.” For a while, anyway.
I wouldn’t ignore the dialectic as pointless. Even if the extreme implications of rival ideological positions lack salience because unlikely to come about anytime soon, they still tell us a lot about how individual arguments will turn out, who will support or pressure whom, general trends, etc.
For example, we can see sub-global cases of national combination or disaggregation, and we can see how people react, and what ideas are encouraging those reactions.
When, say, Poland says it isn’t interested in taking in any non-European “refugees” which it never agreed to under any treaty, there are those who say that nations being independent, sovereign entities, Poland has to the near-absolute right to do what it wants with regards to its own internal policies so long as it does not commit aggression against other states, and that the general system of international relations is one in which there is a strong norm that other states ought not to interfere with the exercise of that right or coerce Poland into an undesired course of action, or even comment about what the private, domestic affairs of other nations.
On the other hand, what we actually see is certain other European nations acting as those Poland has no right at all to make decisions like that, that the government of the Poland has obligations to some set of superior law and higher values than the national interest or popular desires, that treaties and agreements are secondary in importance to certain universal tenets, and that when they have the power advantage to do so, it not just appropriate but compulsory for other, ‘better’ entities to ‘supervise’ the actions of such backward places, and to publicly hector and threaten that country with all kind of adverse consequences if they don’t yield to the ideological correct policy. Furthermore, the only reason not to do the same thing to the Russians, Chinese, etc. is mere expediency deriving from lack of sufficient strength to shove it down their throats.
The de facto philosophy behind the second position is what I call, “multi-national progressivism”, (or “transnational Davos-crowd-ism”) which simply looks at nations like have no real right to be different from U.S. states. You might as well say that we’ll never see all the states combined into one big state, or that we’ll never get rid of them and just have the central, federal government run everything from Washington. Well, that may be true, but so what? The ambit for state sovereignty is just too narrow to matter much.
I agree with all of this (and it is very well stated), but since there is no likelihood that this “federal” system the transnationals are urging upon us will encompass the whole world, to argue about what the result would be if it did seems to be going down a rabbit hole.
Since this “federal” system will encompass only Western nations, which have shown no proclivity for going to war against each other since World War II, it seems doubtful that it will result in fewer wars. Meanwhile, the importation into the West of unassimilable immigrants from more violent societies – one of the main transnational imperatives – is making Western societies more violent internally. This does not seem to bother the progressives and their libertarian sidekicks.
One could make a stronger case that WWI (which I like to call the Dynasts’ War) was a war against nationalism — the Hohenzollerns, and especially the Habsburgs and Romanovs were all perched on multinational empires. The spark was the Habsburgs trying to keep a multinational empire together declaring war on Serbia.
The war was welcomed by crowds in Berlin, London and Paris. Now suppose there were no uniforms to wear, nor arms to carry (just go to war in your street clothes with home implements of death) – would the mob still rally to the colors? I think there were more primitive desires in play than nationalism.
Governments mis-informed when sudden advances in communications ‘short them’. In both the WWs, the key element being a sudden explosion of faster, broader exchange of information. WW1 was the sudden appearance of switched exchange telephone, WW2 was overnight appearance of broadcast radio.
Governments threatened when technology changes finance. Telephone brought continent wide stock trading and trusts, the royal house unprepared. Hitler, Roosevelt; the radio presidents. The information explosions require rapid restructuring to avoid the Google/Facebook problem. Government share dropping,. government restructuring resisted, odd violence erupts.
Two books that are well worth reading:
“The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914”, Christopher Clark
“The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, John Mearsheimer
In the first, Clark shows that really, as a proximate cause, Russia started the war, by mobilizing their troops. As a necessity, Germany also mobilized. They would be fighting a two front war. The whole book is a gem. My precise is not the thesis of the book.
In the second, Mearsheimer shows how great power politics mean that great powers always seek to gain power at the expense of their rivals. In this view, it was inevitable that the First World War, as we call it, would start given that Germany’s industrial might had surpassed the other European powers and would become the hegemon in Europe. This also explained why the US joined the war in 1917. Germany was going to win and become the European hegemon.
I meant to write “précis”, not precise. The iPad autocorrected.